Today, rich pay income taxes at a much lower rate than the middle class...

Go here and look at the tables.

1. They are exempt from Social Security taxes on most of their incomes;

Social Security payments stop increasing when your income gets to $106,800. This is the approximate income floor for the top ten percent. To be able to say you pay Social Security on only half your income would put you in the top 3 percent.

Medicare taxes have no ceiling at all.

They are the beneficiaries of countless special dispensations written into the 70,000 page tax code for their benefit.

I do my own taxes, and have a pretty good idea what's in there. As a self-employed person, I can deduct a number of things as business expenses, which helps, but almost all of the major deductions on Schedule A have income caps, i.e. if you make too much money, you can't take the deduction unless it's more than a certain percentage. I haven't been able to take medical deductions for years. I can't deduct my kid's college tuition. I haven't reached the mortage deduction limit yet, but it's there. Anyway, you can see that the rich still pay almost all of the taxes, so obviously they aren't getting past them to any great degree.

All that being said, I wouldn't mind seeing income tax reforms either, in the form of some kind of flat or sales tax system. You'll never get it. There are huge amounts of political power to be had in being able to reward or punish constituents with the current tax codes.